A Quote by James Russell Lowell

Taste is the next gift to genius.

James Russell Lowell

Quote Topics

Genius Gift Next Taste

Quote Author

James Russell Lowell
American - Poet
February 22, 1819 - August 12, 1891

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

Alexander Pope

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all.

Madame de Stael

Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.

Joshua Reynolds

Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself.

Bill Vaughan

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Susan Sontag

Genius is allied to a warm and inflammable constitution; delicacy of taste, to calmness and sedateness. Hence it is common to find genius in one who is a prey to every passion.

Henry Home, Lord Kames

Neatness begets order; but from order to taste there is the same difference as from taste to genius, or from love to friendship.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

High original genius is always ridiculed on its first appearance; most of all by those who have won themselves the highest reputation in working on the established lines. Genius only commands recognition when it has created the taste which is to appreciate it.

James Anthony Froude

It is true there is nothing displays a genius, I mean a quickness of genius, more than a dispute; as two diamonds, encountering, contribute to each other's luster. But perhaps the odds is much against the man of taste in this particular.

William Shenstone

Next to genius is the power of feeling where true genius lies.

Sarah Josepha Hale

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

Vladimir Nabokov

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

Marcel Duchamp

Universality is the distinguishing mark of genius. There is no such thing as a special genius, a genius for mathematics, or for music, or even for chess, but only a universal genius. The genius is a man who knows everything without having learned it.

Otto Weininger

I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.